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PROGRAM NOTE

KRYZSTAŁ MUZYKI (“Crystal of Music”) was written while I was traveling in southern Poland where I was moved by the ancient mysticism of Polish culture, its history so fraught with tragedy and suffering, and the intensely beautiful creativity that these have always fed into.

As in fractal patterns of crystals, every note and every musical element unfolds from the piece’s first three notes, and the entire piece is thus an unfolding of a single three-note motive replicated on seven timescales simultaneously. From the outermost structure to the piece’s fastest moving notes, the exact same same relationship holds at every instant. The sole exception is the music boxes, whose liberated notes are like light penetrating the fixed structure and being refracted in unpatterned shimmering.